WPC-137 - Taking Risks with Joe and Kait Russo

JOE & KAIT RUSSOTRAVELERS & CONTENT CREATORS

Joe & Kait Russo are full-time travelers, living in a travel van with their husky, Leo, as they travel the country to see what adventures they can find. Their popular YouTube channel, We're the Russos, informs thousands of would-be travelers about the ins, outs, and in-betweens of life on the road.

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THIS WEEK’S INDIE PUBLISHING NEWS:

Smashwords hasn’t been hacked, but you might be — Smashwords, aka the “other” eBook aggregator service, sent an announcement to users stating that they’ve noted attempts to hack the service. In an email to users, Smashwords stated, “The security team here at Smashwords has detected multiple attempts by cybercriminals attempting to log in to Smashwords author accounts using stolen email/password combinations…To date, we’re aware of two authors who were victimized. Working with our payments partner PayPal we managed to recover the funds for one author earlier today and will continue pressing them to do the same for the other.” The service assured users that they had not been hacked but they encourage Smashwords users to change their passwords to something secure and strong, right away. So how about you? Does this vulnerability impact you at all? https://goodereader.com/blog/indie-author-news/smashwords-was-not-hacked-but-change-your-password

SFWA joins Author’s Guild and others to speak out about Open Library. The Internet Archive is back in the news again, as author groups speak out about alleged copyright infringement, thanks in large part to its Open Library initiative. The service was intended to be a sort of virtual library, where readers could check out works by various authors, and check them back in without retaining copies for themselves. Internet Archive holds to a somewhat sketchy position that if one has purchased the rights to a copy of the book, one is legally allowed to lend that book to others. What makes this tricky is, they’re right. Sort of. But the legality surrounding electronically transmitted copyrighted properties is still in a primordial ooze, with a lot of questions still to be answered. Many author groups, including SFWA and the Author’s Guild, see this as infringement, while some see it as functionally no different than services such as OverDrive, which allows libraries to purchase a license to distribute a book, and to distribute it in essentially the exact way Open Library is doing it. The key difference—Open Library is scanning legally purchased print books, as well as purchasing ebooks, to create its offering. So is this infringement? Is it violating copyright? Tell me in the comments. http://www.sfwa.org/2018/01/infringement-alert/

Could Mickey Mouse become public domain? Probably not, but Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, is set to enter the public domain in 2024. This comes two decades after Disney and other entertainment industry giants successfully lobbied to have copyright extended by 20 years, even for work that had already been created. This was a blow to intellectual property law, which is essentially meant to encourage new and original works. Oddly, at the moment no one is pushing any legislation to extended these rights further, meaning properties created in 1923 and beyond will start entering public domain soon. And here, a happy time can be had by all, as artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creatives gain access to a wealth of old content they can bend, fold, mutilate, and remix into new content. Does this breathe life into past work, or perpetuate the entertainment industry’s habit of falling back to cultivated ground, rather than pushing ahead into new frontiers? You tell me, in the comments. https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/sonny-bono-is-dead.html